Crunch Time comes for us all

Welcome to Crunch Time, when students frantically try to complete end-of-semester assignments while their professors try to respond calmly to requests for extensions and exemptions and just one more round of feedback on drafts, except that some students don't seem to have written drafts for a papers due two days from now, which is alarming in itself, but then the types of feedback I'm asked to provide are alarming in a different way. 

Just this week I have been called upon to remind students that Facebook did not exist in 1870, that an event can not be influenced by events occurring decades later, that summary is not the same as analysis (again! and again!), that reading a book review is not the same as reading the book, and that some random dude's online literary ramblings don't necessarily count as an academic source just because he has a college degree.

Once again I have had to repeatedly explain that online citation engines are only as good as the information we feed them, and if we can't figure out the difference between and author and a translator or between the title of the article and the name of the journal, we're going to get a mess, and then it won't do any good to say But that's what the citation engine said because once it appears in a student's paper, I treat it as the student's work.

With all these competing demands swirling around my inbox, it's no wonder I'm having trouble sleeping. I wake up in the wee hours with pain in my shoulder or hip and feel myself falling gently back toward snooze-land until annoying questions start popping up: Did I spend enough time on information literacy with my first-year writers? Do I need to revise that prompt to state even more explicitly what kinds of sources are appropriate, or am I being too directive already? Too much hand-holding or not enough? Eventually I give up trying to get back to sleep and then hours later I'm sitting in my office wondering why I can't put together a coherent sentence.

But at least the incoherent sentences I'm producing are my own. No AI or plagiarism at work in this space and no paraphrasing of online summaries, cited or otherwise. All errors and infelicities are entirely original--an ill-favored thing but mine own, and perhaps just enough to carry me through the Crunch.